An association of Igbo clergymen, Concerned Igbo Ministers’ Commission, has reacted to the recent killings in Kwara State, saying leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu, was jailed for warning against ‘Jihadist incursion’ into Nigeria’s southern territories.
Over a hundred deaths have been recorded in the attacks on communities in Kwara, believed to have been carried out by Islamist extremists.
In a statement on Friday, President of the Concerned Igbo Ministers’ Commission, Rev. Tony Uzor, expressed regrets that Kanu’s warning about the spread of extremism in the country, particularly into the South, was ignored.
Uzor expressed disappointment that rather than act on Kanu’s warning, Nigerian authorities threw him into jail.
The clergyman faulted the government for going after Kanu, who he said was only armed with microphone, while pampering insurgents and bandits responsible for killing thousands of Nigerians.
According to Uzor, for the Nigerian government, “words are treated as deadlier than weapons, and warnings are punished more harshly than mass murder”.
The Concerned Igbo Ministers’ Commission added that Kanu was arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned because his broadcasts unsettled the status quo that favours the caliphate.
Faulting Kanu’s conviction, the cleric added, “A man who spoke — who warned, provoked, irritated, unsettled — was caged as though he had spilled blood. Meanwhile, blood was actually spilled elsewhere, in industrial quantities, and the nation barely blinked.
“Justice James Omotosho, presiding over the Federal High Court in Abuja, sentenced Nnamdi Kanu to life imprisonment in November 2025 for terrorism charges — inciting violence through his broadcasts and calls for Biafran independence. Kanu, the very man who had long warned of this exact impending doom in Yorubaland: the spread of religious extremism, the unchecked jihadist incursions into Southern territories, the failure to protect communities from the reach of these terrorists. He was convicted not for wielding weapons, but for wielding words that unsettled the status quo.
“Justice Omotosho handed down concurrent life terms, ensuring Kanu rots in isolation at Sokoto Correctional Centre of all places, the seat of the caliphate itself. All while the real killers in Kwara — and countless other places — evade the same zealous pursuit.
“It is apparently safer to wield an AK-47 assault rifle than a microphone — provided the AK-47 aligns with the unspoken hierarchies of power.”
The Igbo clergymen further expressed concern that hundreds can be killed in rural Nigeria by armed groups whose methods and ideology are well known, without any serious response from the government.
The clerics said the Nigerian government has not displayed the same zeal it deployed in going after Kanu and IPOB in efforts to stop killings by Jihadists and Islamic extremists.
The statement added, “The dead are absorbed into statistics and forgotten.
Take Kwara State, where just this week, Islamic terrorists slaughtered at least 170 people in the villages of Woro and Nuku just as Nnamdi Kanu predicted many years back. Gunmen stormed in, executing residents at close range — many bound and shot, others burned alive — for refusing to submit to extremist Sharia rule.
Homes razed, shops looted, families shattered. The attackers, linked to genuine terrorist groups from Northern Nigeria and not proscribed, left a trail of mass graves and missing loved ones.
“President Tinubu deployed troops after the fact, blaming jihadists, but where was the same preemptive fury that accompanied Monday sit-at-home civil disobedience?
“But let one man (Nnamdi Kanu) speak inconvenient truths, invoke history, or challenge the emotional comfort of the state, and the system awakens with ferocity tagging him terrorist when he has not killed anyone. Those who kill are managed. Those who speak are crushed.”
The Concerned Igbo Ministers’ Commission accused the Nigerian government of jailing the country’s “prophets” while protecting killers.
According to the group, the government has shown that it is determined to ensure that Nigeria remains one at all cost.
“The stability of the murderous state matters more than the sanctity of life. Preventing uncomfortable ideas is more urgent than preventing funerals.
Silence in the face of killings is preferable to noise in the face of injustice.
“Because a society confident in its moral foundations does not jail prophets and tolerate killers. It does not obsess over speech while normalising graves,” the statement added.
